CAMPS 91 



to these fresh-water lakes, just as there are guides and skippers to take out 

 Gulf fishing parties in summer weather now. 



The more closely you examine the situation, allowing everything possi- 

 ble in the way of an improvement of agriculture on a sound base, allowing 

 everything that may soon be expected in the development of forest industries 

 utilizing wood pulp, the more plainly it appears that the principal usefulness 

 of this forest for the next many years, and the main support of its people, 

 will be recreation based on scenic beauty, its generally agreeable climate, 

 and its game resources. Game, it appears, will be especially important. 



There is rather brisk summer-tourist business here now along the 

 western Florida Gulf Coast. It is mainly an exodus of middle-class people 

 seeking relief from the dense, humid heat of summer in the interior coun- 

 try immediately to the north and west. Over on this low shore Gulf breezes 

 keep moving most of the summer and the summer nights are generally 

 cool. Visitors attracted by the Gulf winds probably bring more money to 

 the residents of this forest and of the towns adjoining than all their other 

 products combined. But such money blows in only during the summer 

 vacation season, in any quantity; from May to October, in the main. 

 During the rest of the year most tourists push on southeast to the warmer, 

 steadier sunshine and the great human swarms of Florida's peninsula beach 

 resorts: St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Palm Beach, and Miami, particularly. 



In point of outdoor sunbaths and the rather gaudy diversions of the 

 Florida beaches, this more northern and western Gulf Coast country cannot 

 compete as a winter playground with peninsular Florida as a whole. It 

 now attracts a sparse scattering of hardier winter refugees from overcon- 

 gestion and mounting prices on the peninsula; that is about all. And yet 

 the bayou country of the Choctawhatchee and its environs has, for some, 

 winter attractions which are incomparable. It has a bracing, swiftly chang- 

 ing winter climate, springlike to a northerner, much like Maryland's 

 April and early May. It has openness, and space, and a relative solitude to 

 offer. To the naturalist it offers for pleasure or study an amazing range of 

 hardy vegetation, and on both its placid shores and wide, shining waters, 

 a returning wealth of wildlife. 



Wildlife; that is the Choctawhatchee's great natural crop, and the main 



